Scintillation materials are scientifically and economically significant in conjunction with photodetectors to detect high-energy photons, electrons, and other particles in various applications, which includes medical imaging, geological exploration, homeland security, and high-energy physics. In radiation detectors/imaging devices, scintillation material (or scintillators) may include, for example, cerium-doped scintillators. Scintillators used in this way are typically in the form of single crystals or ceramics. A detector assembly may contain an array of many smaller scintillator elements. In order to maximize the scintillation light that reaches the photodetector and to prevent that scintillation light from leaking from each scintillator element to adjacent ones, scintillator elements may be coated with a thin layer of non-transparent material with good optical reflectivity.
The externally coated reflector layer, which may be referred to as an “extrinsic reflector,” may not bond well to the scintillator elements and may be undesirably thick, increasing the overall detector size. Also, the manufacturing process of applying the extrinsic reflector is an extra step and therefore introduces an additional cost in constructing a detector that includes pixelized scintillators.
Thus, there is a continual need for a simpler way to produce a reflector for scintillators.